1. ISTITUTO
LUCE
historical
archive
Italian candidate to
UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register
for its universal value
Marco
Rendina
m.rendina@cineci+aluce.it
@mrendina
13. 25.000 500.000
Views per month Views per month
16. Which are the benefits of this partnership
• Instant increased visibility, worldwide
• Monetize access to our assets through a share on
advertising
• Ability to track use and misuse of our content on-line
• Access to know-how and best practices for building
audience and engagement on-line
• Zero costs on managing the video streaming
infrastructure
n is lef t out
Digit isatio
17. ...And now
go on with your
questions...
m.rendina@cineci+aluce.it
@mrendina
Editor's Notes
I’m …. I follow international projects at Cinecittà Luce.I fear you could have expectations about this presenttion, that I’m going to disattend. But I wil come back to this at the end.But first of all I’d like to spend a few words on who we are, since we’re not big and well known like BBC or INA.
Cinecittà Luce is the most important cinema related public company in Italy, born from the merging of Cinecittà Holding with Istituto Luce, an institution established back in 1924 with the primary goal of using cinema to spread culture and knowledge, but also to use it for propaganda. LUCE is the acronym of the Educational Cinematographic Union.We are quite small but we hold one of the largest audiovisual footage collections in Europe concerning the history of the XXth century, that it has also been nominated by UNESCO-Italy for the “Memory of the World” registry.Weown the rights over ourcollections and weregularly exploit themcommerciallysellingfootage and photos. So wehave a double soul… A Memory Instituton and also a commercial archive
Our collections are composed by: 12.000 newsreels, from the early ‘20s till the ‘80s
5.000 documentaries, from the beginning till the end of the XX century
1 million meters of unedited film
And 3 millions photos, again covering the whole XXth century.
Our public mission is to preserve this audiovisual heritage, and we do this since decades, preserving our films and photos in the analogue domain, which is easier and cheaper.And we try to do it in the best way we can, with the little resources we have. But we’ve realised that preservation alone doesn’t make really sense (and it’s not really sustainable). Preservation and access now together form a new imperative for AV archives. To quote my friend Peter K. “Preservation for access, access for preservation, forms the double helix of a memory institution’s DNA”.
This is a quote from the New Renaissance report, that we subscribe fully…And to paraphrase again this report, “if one word should encompass and summarise the vision of Cinecittà Luce, it would be «access»”.This is the main reason, the main drive behindthe collaboration with Google/YouTube, thatI’m going to present.
Since 10 years now we run our own portal giving free access to 70.000 video titles streamed online and 500.000 photos, all of them well cataloged and indexed.Unfortunately only in Italian.
This portal now generates on average 25.000 video views per month (mainly researchers, students documumentary producers, history enthusiast)
The 4th July, three months ago, Google and Cinecittà Luce announced the launch of a new YouTube Channel that will host all the audiovisual heritage of Luce archive.We started with 30.000 videos, but we’re going to upload all our film archive there.
To show you directly the most visible result: this is the comparison in access! 25.000 video views per months on one side, and more than 500.000 on the YouTube channel…And this figure is growing.Since the launch 3 months ago we reached 1.5 million views.In one month, on our channel, we gathered more views than what we got in one year on our portal.
Basically we increased our monthly views of a factor of 20.This was the most evident outcome, but …
- Instant increased visibility, was the most tangible, with an impact also on the access to our own portal (and benefits for our footage sales)- Mere money coming in from advertising that Google sells while showing our material (we have the full control on this…)- Possibility to use Google fingerprinting technology called Content ID, that allows us to track and eventually take down or better monetize our assets that have been put online improperly.- Access to know-how,best practices, optimization tips, and strategies for building audience and engagement on YouTube (Creator Playbook)- Zero costs on managing the video streaming infrastructure, which will allow us to save these costs from our archive budget (we’re going to embed the videos streamed from YouTube in our portal)Digitisation is not part of this partnership. And this is maybe the expectation I disattended!
…But I think exactly the real issue, the issue of digitisation for av archives and film heritage institutions is central!There will be no access without preservation, and preservation should pass through digitisation necessarily.Especially because of the shift to digital of the whole cinema and media industry.Our sector needs desperately mass digitsation actions or in 7/10 years, access to film heritage will be at risk.A study from the EC estimates that to digitise the whole European film heritage (1M hours) would require 1B €, which correspond to the 38% of the aid that Members States invest in the cinema industry in one year! I think MS should fund this mass digitisation, not the industry…